OKLAHOMA CITY – Shaun Michael Bosse of Blanchard is seeking to have his three murder convictions in McClain County overturned in light of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling this year in the McGirt case.
A McClain County jury convicted Bosse of killing a single mother and her two young children at their residence near Dibble on July 23, 2010. Testimony in the trial showed that the woman met Bosse online and they dated briefly, although Bosse told investigators it was “not serious.”
Bosse was convicted on October 29, 2012, of three counts of first-degree murder and a charge of first-degree arson. In accordance with the jury’s verdict, he was sentenced to death for the slayings plus 35 years in prison and a $25,000 fine for arson.
The sentence was imposed on December 18, 2012, and the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction in October 2015.
However, a year later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state appellate court was wrong when it concluded there was “no error” when three of the victims’ relatives were allowed to ask the jury to impose the death sentence, contrary to a Supreme Court prohibition issued in 1987.
On reconsideration of the sentence, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruled in May 2017 that the three statements were harmless. Presiding Judge Gary Lumpkin noted that 23 witnesses testified on behalf of Bosse, including 14 who asked the jurors to let Bosse live. And Judge Clancy Smith wrote that, “Overwhelming evidence supports the conclusion that all three murders were heinous, atrocious or cruel.”
Autopsies showed that Katrina Griffin, 25, and her son, Christian, 8, died from multiple stab wounds, while her daughter, Chasity, 6, died from smoke inhalation and burns after the mobile home in which they lived was set afire. Prosecutors said the girl was trapped in a closet and the door was blocked by a chair.
Along with blood evidence, prosecutors said Bosse was linked to the crimes in part by pawn tickets found in his wallet. They showed that on the morning of July 23, 2010 – while the Griffin home was burning – more than 100 items taken from the family were sold by Bosse at seven pawn shops in Oklahoma City. Those items included 42 DVDs and some games, most of which were marked with the initials “KRG”.
In October 2017 Bosse appealed once again to the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case, but the Justices denied his application in March 2018.
BOSSE CITES McGIRT CASE
Now Bosse, 37, wants his McClain County convictions overturned because of the Supreme Court’s ruling July 9 in the case of child molester Jimcy McGirt.
In 1997 McGirt was convicted by a Wagoner County jury of first-degree rape by instrumentation, lewd molestation and forcible sodomy of a 4-year-old girl at a residence in that county, all after a former conviction in 1989 on two counts of forcible oral sodomy of two children in Oklahoma County.
In his appeal to the nation’s highest court, McGirt’s attorney pointed out that his client is a citizen of the Seminole Nation and the alleged crimes in Wagoner County occurred at a residence within the boundaries of the Muscogee (Creek) tribal reservation. Therefore, he asserted, McGirt should have been prosecuted in federal court, and the Court agreed.
In its landmark 5-4 opinion July 9 that is reshaping the criminal justice system in Oklahoma, the Supreme Court ruled that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s reservation was never disestablished by Congress. Therefore, the federal government has jurisdiction over major crimes involving Native Americans in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s historic reservation.
Consequently, McGirt, 71, was indicted August 17 in Muskogee’s Eastern District federal court on three counts of aggravated sexual abuse in “Indian Country”. His jury trial is scheduled for November October 4.
State authorities who file charges in state courts against Native Americans accused of committing serious crimes anywhere in Indian Country are being challenged to justify their decisions. The McGirt decision has triggered a spate of challenges from other members of the Five Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole) who have been charged or convicted in state courts throughout northern and eastern Oklahoma.
Questions are being posed whether the “same legal rationale” of McGirt applies in the other cases, such as Bosse’s, said Chris Wilson, first assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Oklahoma, based in Muskogee. “We’re in uncharted waters,” Wilson said.
MURDER VICTIMS WERE CHICKASAWS
Bosse is a Caucasian but his three victims were Native Americans and their murders occurred in Indian Country. The Chickasaw Nation’s Tribal Government Services submitted documents on which were printed the tribal membership numbers of Katrina Griffin, Christian Joe Griffin and Chasity Renae Hammer, and the degree of Indian blood for each of them, at the time of their deaths.
The Chickasaw Nation filed a legal brief in the Bosse case “only to establish [that] the Chickasaw Reservation and its boundaries still exist. In its documents the tribe pointed out that:
• treaties with the Chickasaw Nation “show Congress established the Chickasaw Reservation.”
• because Congress has not explicitly “extinguished the Chickasaw Reservation or its boundaries” defined by an 1855 treaty, the reservation “continues to exist.”
• all land within the boundaries of the reservation is “Indian Country.”
• the location of the crime in McClain County lies within the boundaries of the Chickasaw Reservation and “thus in Indian Country.”
BOSSE HOPES TO EVADE CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
If Bosse’s state court conviction is dismissed and his case is removed to the Western District federal court, Bosse hopes the stiffest sentence he potentially could receive would be life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
U.S. prosecutor Wilson confirmed Wednesday that in the federal judicial system, capital punishment cannot be imposed on a Native American convicted of committing a murder in Indian Country unless the tribe has ‘opted in’ to the death penalty. Of the 39 federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma, only the Sac & Fox Nation sanctions capital punishment, Wilson said.
Whether a white man could be executed for murdering a Native American in Indian Country has not yet been thoroughly researched, Wilson said.
Patrick Dwayne Murphy, an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and two other men were accused of first-degree murder in 1999 in McIntosh County, in Indian Country. The trio were accused of severely beating the victim and cutting off his genitalia; the man later died from his wounds.
A McIntosh County jury in 2000 convicted Murphy of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death because they deemed his crime “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel.”
After he was sentenced, it emerged that the murder had occurred on what had once been Indian land. Murphy maintained that only the federal government can prosecute him and that a federal law bars imposition of the death penalty because he is an Indian.
At the state’s request, a McIntosh County judge dismissed Murphy’s case September 3 “based on the 10th Circuit [Court of Appeals] finding this court lacked jurisdiction as the alleged crimes occurred within Indian Country.”
In response, Eastern District U.S. Attorney Brian Kuester announced September 21 that Murphy, 51, was indicted in Muskogee’s federal district court for murder and kidnapping.
Murphy’s two accomplices have since died, court records reflect.
COURTS INUNDATED WITH MOTIONS FOR DISMISSAL
All of the Five Tribes and “potentially some of the other tribes throughout Oklahoma have unresolved reservation boundary issues,” Stacy Leeds, a newly appointed district court judge for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, told KOSU public radio recently. “These are going to bubble up in local district courts all across Oklahoma in motions to dismiss,” said Leeds, a Cherokee Nation citizen and a professor of Indian Law at the University of Arkansas.
“You’re going to see McGirt play out in each of the tribes,” Leeds told KOSU. “But they all have slightly different language in their treaties and their allotment agreements. And although the federal stat- ute tends to apply to all Five Tribes, there’s still some very tribally specific distinctions.”
Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter stated on an Oklahoma City television program July 11 that although the McGirt opinion “directly relates” to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, “We think it applies to the other four tribes eventually.”
Citing the McGirt ruling, two accused murderers from Seminole County filed motions with the Eastern District federal court to have their state court convictions set aside. Both are members of the Seminole Nation and contend that the crimes for which they’ve been charged occurred on the tribe’s reservation, in Indian Country.
A man who was charged in Craig County with possession of a firearm after a prior felony conviction asserted last week that the state has no jurisdiction over him: He is a citizen of the Miami tribe and the crime occurred on the Cherokee reservation.
A Tulsa man who pleaded guilty in January to manslaughter in the strangulation death of his wife had his case removed to Tulsa’s Northern District federal court in August because of the McGirt decision. His attorney argued that the confessed killer is a member of the Cherokee Nation and the crime scene is part of the Creek Nation reservation.
Cherokee Nation Attorney General Sara Hill told the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper that her office is tracking more than 100 cases that involve appeals and pending criminal matters.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has recruited attorneys from around the nation “to help us with these cases,” said Doug Horn, assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Oklahoma. Lawyers from Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Arizona have “come in and are living here” to help resolve the issue, Horn said.
Wilson said some of the DOJ volunteers “are doing six months” in Oklahoma and others are teleworking and traveling to/from Oklahoma.
In its McGirt ruling, the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court “ridiculed the ‘speculative’ concern of ‘Oklahoma and the dissent’ that ‘thousands of Native Americans like Mr. McGirt wait in the wings to challenge the jurisdictional basis of their state court convictions,” Attorney General Hunter wrote in a legal document filed August 3. “And yet that is exactly what happened...”